2Department of Neurology, University of Colorado Health, Fort Collins, CO, USA
3SRH Neurorehabilitation Hospital Bad Wimpfen, Bad Wimpfen, Germany
Entrainment is defined by a temporal locking process in which one system’s motion or signal frequency entrains the frequency of another system. This process is a universal phenomenon that can be observed in physical (e.g., pendulum clocks) and biological systems (e.g., fire flies). However, entrainment can also be observed between human sensory and motor systems. The function of rhythmic entrainment in rehabilitative training and learning was established for the first time by Thaut and colleagues in several research studies in the early 1990s. It was shown that the inherent periodicity of auditory rhythmic patterns could entrain movement patterns in patients with movement disorders (see for a review: Thaut et al., 1999). Physiological, kinematic, and behavioral movement analysis showed very quickly that entrainment cues not only change